]]>A subsidiary of German car giant Daimler has acquired two startupss — RideScout and myTaxi — that make mobile apps focused on transportation choices in cities. The move is part of Daimler’s continued push beyond car manufacturing and into developing technology for urban mobility, as a next generation of city-dwellers is increasingly giving up on car ownership and opting for transportation alternatives from on-demand car services like Uber to car-sharing services like Zipcar.

Daimler owns a mobility-focused subsidiary called moovel (formerly named Daimler Mobility Services), and under the moovel brand has operated a car-sharing network called car2go for a couple years now. Car2go has amassed 850,000 registered members across 26 cities, and the network enables its users to rent Smart Fortwo cars (made by Daimler) by the minute and hour.

Routine users of car2go like that a car can be picked up from one parking spot and left in another. Most other car-sharing services require users to bring the cars back to their original parking spots. The car2go network also includes some electric Smart ForTwos.

Car2go’s North American arm has acquired the transportation app startup RideScout. RideScout, which launched an early version at SXSW last year, has created an app that enables users to discover transportation options from their location, choosing among buses, trains, carpools, car shares, bike shares, walking or just driving and parking.

Many automakers have cautiously been exploring car sharing, ride sharing and alternative urban mobility. As more people share cars and rides, fewer people will need to own cars, so that cuts into the bottom line of the car-selling business. As urban populations grow and driving and parking in cities becomes less attractive, car companies will need new ways to reach these car-free consumers.

Rather than fight, the automakers are accepting that car sharing is part of a larger cultural shift in which consumers are less enamored with ownership and more enamored with services. And if car sharing truly becomes a widespread cultural phenomenon, the automotive companies best positioned in terms of car sharing will exert greater influence over what model of car consumers drive.

]]>Innovation and change in the mobile industry is driving demand for increased control of data and the user experience of location-based apps. New tools and approaches are emerging to meet this demand.

]]>There have generally been two options for car-sharing companies throughout the world: allow one-trips or don’t. Later this year, Zipcar plans to join the former camp, and on Friday announced it will launch one-way trips in select markets in the fall using the Honda Fit cars.

One-way driving options can be a pretty convenient perk, enabling drivers to pick up a car in the city and drop it off at, say, the airport, before a big trip. It just adds flexibility, particular in a city with good public transportation and other mobility options.

BMW’s car sharing service DriveNow has offered one-way trips since it launched using BMW’s all-electric ActiveEs. Daimler’s car2go network also offers one-way trips with its fleet of Smart fortwos and electric fortwos. Because most electric cars have shorter ranges than gas cars and need a designated charging station (rather than any old gas station you can find), one-way trips can offer a more bite-sized, and more predictable path, which can be a good fit for using EVs.

Zipcar’s new one-way cars will use the logos you see above to indicate they can be dropped off at a different location than they were picked up.

]]>As the sharing economy hits the mainstream it will force businesses to rethink customer acquisition and retention – in a world where the customers, increasingly often, are the business. The sharing economy, where businesses such as Zipcar or Airbnb provide resources or a platform for people to share goods when they need them, is growing thanks to always-on connectivity and real time data.

It’s not that 100 percent utilization should be a goal, since there is value in keeping some slack. At 95 percent of theoretical capacity, average total time to complete a task (including the wait to begin) will typically be 10 times as long as at a 50 percent average load. A one-hour response becomes an overnight wait.

“One plus spare” is therefore a perfectly reasonable model for many situations – but “base load plus 19x spare capacity” is far more difficult to justify in economic terms.

Overcoming the reasons not to share

Yet, how do businesses encourage people to share? There are four major barriers to sharing, each of which invites a solution in terms of technologies and practices that are clearly feasible and ready to scale.

Ease of discoveryTraditionally, it has been difficult to discover shareable assets that are owned by people who don’t rent things out as a full-time occupation. Close communities, such as student dormitories, have enough needs in common — within a small enough radius — that a simple bulletin board may suffice; in urban neighborhoods, something like Craigslist or Freecycle finds enough density of opportunity to be worth the effort of operation and participation.

Opportunity exists to shift from exclusive use to shared use even in less densely packed communities. A third-party branded service could enable registration of a newly bought product in a sharing network, as easily as an owner registers for new-product warranty coverage; at the same time, decreasing logistics costs could expand the feasible geographic size of a sharing community, in partnership with a service provider such as the UPS Store network or Mailboxes Etc.

Someone is going to create the category-defining network of storefront locations that avoid the need for borrower and lender to schedule pickup and return of a loaned item, instead offering convenient pick-up service at the lender’s home for transfer and availability at 24-hour locations convenient to the borrower.

The social revolution of structured connection (based on location, interests and other attributes) is key to this ease of discovery. Social network communities drive their own growth by continual outreach. It’s therefore in the interest of vendors to encourage these arrangements that bring people into a community of potential buyers, even if they enter as renters.

Economy of trustBorrowing depends on the borrower’s trust that the borrowed article will be in good condition and the lender’s confidence that it will be returned likewise. Renting from an established brand, whether the borrowed article is a car or a handbag or an arc welder, is a common means for the buyer to ease discovery and reduce risk; the terms and conditions of such rentals (usually including a credit card number) offer the lender the converse protection against theft or damage. Lower barriers to entry and perhaps better overall performance, are now arising in reputation economies such as eBay’s. However, that trust comes at a price — a formal academic experiment shows eBay’s program results in an 8 percent increase in the cost of goods.

The opportunity exists to build a more portable reputation service that individuals can use in many settings, compared to the proprietary reputations that are specific to a community such as eBay. There’s room to create something in the trust revolution that both raises expectations and lowers costs of making customers more confident in taking action.

Efficient paymentsPlummeting transaction costs have already made it typical for even small purchases to use electronic payment; services such as Square have offered entry into the credit card economy for vendors of small services who could never meet volume and management costs for a traditional merchant account.

Opportunity exists for shareable items to have their own associated financial accounts, for a bill to be paid to the piece of equipment rather than to the owner — making it easier to share or sublet an item, with revenues from sharing during a period of time being automatically assigned to the parties managing that item during that time.

Off-the-top allowances, for costs such as maintenance or storage, could be collected automatically in an account that was owned by the item itself, turning a shareable asset into a single entity, carrying with it all the resources needed to keep it in serviceable condition and further reducing the complexity of ownership for the individual who is not a full-time rental service provider.

Writing and deploying the applications to do this would be a forbidding obstacle, except for the apps revolution of superior productivity and radically simpler deployment that we see already in cloud-based platforms.

Accountable asset careFinally, in any case where a shared asset is subject to wear and tear, there’s potential for conflict over which of several users is creating what share of needed maintenance and repairs. The internet of things is bruited about as a platform for many innovations, but in this case, telematics monitoring of item use can be a basis for automatic and objective allocation of costs among users. This model is already being applied in spheres such as automobile insurance ratings. Existing mechanisms used in factories are ready to move into the SMB and consumer sectors as well.

Making all of this feasible is the big data revolution of powerful collection, analysis and understanding that’s further enabled by the mobility revolution.
Addressing these obstacles to convenient, trusted sharing can extend proven models into much broader use. It might seem that more sharing would reduce product sales, but sharing could also maintain or even increase sales: people who aspire to own a top-tier product, but can’t persuade themselves that they can afford it, might rationalize the purchase by telling themselves they’ll offset the cost with income from sharing. Further, additional exposure of a premium brand to customers who might never imagine buying it could intensify their desire to own it.

Recognizing and encouraging this leverage opens the door to compelling advantages of a collaborative customer relationship, from open innovation to affinity communities of customers and fans, further driving business forward. To anyone who asks if these collaborative networks are actually a business, one need only reply: “See the customers?”

Any business whose customers are not the focus of attention will be hard-pressed to compete with a model in which the customers are the business.

Peter Coffee is the VP & Head of Platform Research at salesforce.com inc.

]]>Millions of people in the world have given up owning cars and have opted to join car sharing networks, which can make transportation more efficient and potentially cheaper, parking easier, and traffic lighter in cities. Will companies and cities join in the car-sharing craze? Startup Local Motion hopes so, and on Wednesday it announced that it’s raised a $6 million Series A round, led by venture capital heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz, to grow its staff and customer base.

Local Motion — which counts Google and the city of Sacramento as some of its bigger clients — makes software and hardware that enables companies and organizations to share a fleet of vehicles. The company is three years old, and actually started out its life building electric car technology, but over the last year has pivoted towards car sharing tech. Clearly its investors think that was a good call.

Local Motion installs its connected hardware in customers’ cars (at no upfront cost to the owner) and customers pay a monthly fee for the service. The customer can use a web portal to track data about fleet utilization and optimization, and the system can also offer apps for drivers like recognizing the driver and customizing the experience.

The result is that a company like Google can have its own Zipcar-style reservation and mobile phone or badge-unlocking systems. Cities like Sacramento — and Local Motion is in discussions with Las Vegas’ Downtown Project, too — can have hundreds of cars that they need to keep track of on a tight budget. For now, much of this is done manually, without a lot of transparency.

Local Motion’s co-founder Clement Gires — who spent time working on Paris’ famous bike-sharing network — tells me that his company’s car sharing tech can quickly help their customers save money and better utilize cars. Better, more convenient use of cars can mean easier access by employees (so happier employees), but also more efficient use of fuel (potentially lower fuel costs). Transparency of company and public assets is important, too, when running a business or city.

Another side perk of the system is that the car sharing tech can help the company bring electric vehicles into the network. The software and hardware can determine if the cars’ routes are regular enough for EV driving and charging and figure out if (and how much) money the company will save if they switch cars over to electricity.

Gires tells me that they’ll be using the venture capital money to expand staff to potentially 25 by next year, and the startup is hiring employees like electrical engineers, module and mobile developers, web and app developers, and marketing and sales people.

All of this innovation in the car sharing space has been spurred by the dropping costs of the wireless networks, computing and mobile hardware that have to be installed in the car. In addition, the rise of the smartphone as a device that can be used to lock and unlock doors, or reserve a car, has emerged as an obvious way to manage cars. These car sharing systems wouldn’t have been cheap enough or convenient enough 5-7 years ago.

In fact, a lot of other companies throughout the years have tried various ways to use connected wireless devices in cars to make company fleets better — but a lot of them have been kludgey and expensive. Cellphone companies early on sold corporate tech that enabled cellphones to manage company cars and trucks (remember iDEN?). Startup Green Road has built a business off of selling connected hardware and a service for corporate fleets that gives real-time feedback to drivers and tries to teach them to be better drivers.

The connected car will be an area of significant innovation over the next few years as startups and big companies alike figure out how to make cars more efficient and smarter, and create in-car data systems that will deliver new types of content and services.

]]>Car sharing is becoming a way of life for many young city dwellers in places like San Francisco, New York and Paris – where the parking sucks, the traffic is heavy and the cost of car ownership is high. But will the cities of India be interested in the car-as-a-service model, too?

The entrepreneurs behind the year-old startup called Zoom think so, and earlier this year they launched a car-sharing service in Bangalore, India. Zoom co-founder and CEO Greg Moran — a former cleantech investor — tells me via email that the company now has 42 vehicles in four different locations across the city (and one of those cars is an electric Reva).

By January of next year, Moran hopes to have 150 vehicles at 15 to 20 locations throughout Bangalore, and potentially move into New Delhi and Mumbai after that. The on-demand car service has only been operating for about 6 months, and the launch and operations have been funded by $650,000 from New York-based Empire Angels, and a group of investors in the UK, which includes Lady Barbara Judge, as well as Larry Summers. Needless to say, they’re just starting out

But, as Forbes points out, India does have a $3 billion rental car market, and anyone who’s spent time in India’s large metro areas like Mumbai and New Delhi know the traffic can be intense. Parking is also extremely difficult in cities like Mumbai. There’s unarguably a lot of demand for people to get from A to B without owning a car, which you can see inherent in India’s common rickshaw system.

However, India is a rather different market than the U.S. or Europe, when it comes to launching and maintaining a startup. For starters, it’s still got a lot of corruption in the business world, which could make getting and monitoring parking spaces difficult for a group of young entrepreneurs, as well as navigating India’s insurance industry. Roads and driving are also a little hairy in India, which I could imagine could make the cost of the upkeep of the cars high (or perhaps the customer would be more accepting of slightly more banged-up, dirtier cars).

The Zipcar model — where the company owns and maintains the cars — can also be a difficult one for a startup because the cost of ownership of the cars can get high. It took Zipcar over a decade to break even and start generating a profit. Even then, the company was sold to Avis, which has deeper pockets to run such a centralized system.

Zoom costs between $3.50 to $4 per hour (or up to $15 per hour for a really high end car), or around $50 a day. So it’s not necessarily super cheap, and that will cut out a lot of the potential market. But that’s probably how much they have to charge right now to cover their costs.

India does have a growing middle to upper-middle class that has some disposable income, and university students of well-off families might be a hot market to start out (at one point the Tata Nano was targeting this group). We’ll check back in with Zoom down the road and see how much they’ve expanded.

Updated at 11:53 PST to reflect the most recent funding at $650,000 and new investors.

At least, that’s what a lot of the market research says. In 2012, a report by the Frontier Group and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund found that between 2001 and 2009, the “average annual number of vehicle miles” traveled by people ages 16 to 34 dropped by 23 percent. And earlier this year, a Zipcar report on millennials and technology found that millennials say the use of transportation apps has decreased their driving frequency by 25 percent.

Zipcar’s “Millennials & Technology” report, February 2013

I live in Manhattan — where owning a car is not only unnecessary and expensive, but often a hindrance. I sometimes want a car, but the fact that I’m embarrassed to admit that probably reflects the ways in which anti-car culture has permeated my generation.

A Digital Life

Living in the digital age is both exhilarating and sobering. We’re early pioneers of technology that can change everyday lives, and yet we’re still figuring out the best ways to use it. In this new weekly column, Laura Owen and Eliza Kern write about navigating the opportunities and the minefields of a digital life.

I grew up in a tiny Connecticut town where nothing was in walking distance and cars meant freedom. In high school, if my friends and I didn’t have anything better to do, we’d drive around. A big night might include nothing more than meeting up with a few other people at the Mobil, then caravanning to Wendy’s. The guys showed off for the girls by driving really fast and doing donuts in parking lots. It was lame, but those nights held a real sense of excitement. Something always might happen.

I’m 29 now and don’t still get a thrill out of drinking in somebody’s basement, but I’ve retained the association between “car” and “escape.” Most of the places I want to “escape” to, though, are just as boring as a gas station. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a car so we could REALLY stock up at Costco? Or, just think, if we had a car, we could go to the Lowe’s in Brooklyn where the Christmas trees are super cheap!

NYC, please let the startups in

But let’s face it: having a car in Manhattan is a drag, starting with the fact that nobody except a couple of Real Housewives actually has their own driveway. Street parking is usually free, but it’s hard to find. Garage parking is expensive — at least a couple hundred dollars a month in our neighborhood. Car insurance adds a couple hundred dollars more to the monthly bill. And then there’s the fact that I’ve never bought a car before and have no idea where to start. So maybe what I want isn’t actually my own car, but better access to them.

Companies like Zipcar, Car2Go, RelayRides and Getaround can solve some of these problems. On-demand car services like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar can solve others. But New York City has hardly been progressive in allowing these companies to operate in the city.

Zipcar is here, but since it has to park most of its cars in indoor parking garages, its hourly rates in the city are higher than they are in other places. The closest Zipcar to my apartment costs $12.50 per hour on weekdays and $14.75 per hour on weekends.

Zipcar is also now owned by Avis Budget — which has led some users, including me, to fear that the service is about to get a whole lot crappier. Other big car-rental companies, like Enterprise and Hertz, have rolled out their own hourly rental programs to compete with Zipcar, but the one experience I had with Hertz OnDemand was so dreadful that I vowed never to use the service again.

Smaller startups have a harder time entering this market because of New York’s tough laws. The car-sharing service RelayRides was forced to stop operating in NYC earlier this year. Getaround, a car-sharing startup based in San Francisco, hasn’t launched in NYC, nor has Car2Go, which rents two-seat Smart Cars by the minute and, unlike Zipcar, allows for one-way rentals (so you can drop one off wherever you like). Some on-demand services like Uber, which compete with taxis, have faced problems in New York, too.

There’s hope: Mayor Bloomberg’s “We Are Made in NY” initiative aims to help startups launch and thrive in NYC. Bike-sharing program CitiBike launched this summer. A one-year pilot that allows e-hailing of taxis was finally approved in June — and it’s been a lifesaver since I moved to Harlem: Yellow cabs are harder to find there than in midtown, but now that I can hail them from smartphone apps like Hailo and Uber, I’ve never had to wait more than a couple of minutes for one. I hope these initiatives are just the start, and that the budding transportation renaissance in New York expands to include cars as well.

Memo to worried car companies: You can help

If auto manufacturers fear that young people are never going to buy their product, they need to look at the ways that this age group does want to use cars and think about how they can fit in. I would love to see these companies supporting the car-sharing services that young people are already using.

If millennials are particularly worried about global warming — and the research suggests that they are — car companies should, in addition to building more electric and hybrid cars, make those cars easier for young people to try out. That might mean partnering with a car-sharing service: Zipcar, for instance, already offers some hybrid vehicles, but they aren’t widely available. So maybe a car company could sponsor discounts through one of those services, letting customers try green cars at a discount.

Car companies can also help by supporting the car-sharing startups that are having a tough time getting established. This may seem at odds with their primary mission, which is to sell cars. But companies might instead try thinking of these startups as a way for young people to test whether they want a car at all. We can’t do that if we don’t have access to the cars in the first place.

]]>Walk down one of the narrow streets of Paris and there’s a good chance you’ll stumble upon one of the world’s most sophisticated car-sharing networks. The Autolib electric car system — marked by the tiny, boxy electric Bluecars and the neon-hued electric car chargers — is run by a public-private partnership and currently has some 65,000 users and a goal to have 3,000 cars available this year.

But Autolib isn’t even the biggest car-sharing network in Paris. That would be the one created by upstart Drivy, which has around 10,000 cars and 115,000 users, according to Drivy’s CEO and founder Paulin Dementhon. The three-year-old Drivy, like its American peers Getaround and RelayRides, has created a platform that enables car owners to rent out their own cars to local drivers.

Cars are just one of the types of things that Parisians are sharing using a new-style economic model that is called everything from collaborative consumption to web sharing to the mesh. One of the earliest web-sharing companies Zilok, which enables users to rent out items like tools, is based in Paris.

Airbnb has a large user base in the city (I’m writing this from a Parisian flat rented on Airbnb). Airbnb’s Olivier Gremillon tells me that Paris is the company’s top city in Europe, and second largest in the world in terms of number of listings and number of guests. Over the past 12 months, Airbnb Paris has welcomed 200,000 guests in Paris, says Gremillon.

There’s so much action going on that a company called OuiShare has launched as part thinktank, part media company to track the local scene. They held a conference called OuiShare Fest in May in Paris that brought in 700 people.

Drivy’s founder Dementhon tells me during an interview at Drivy’s offices: “We [France] are the perfect country for collaborative consumption.” Gremillon tells me that he thinks “Paris and France are really leading the charge in the world of sharing economy.”

Why Paris?

One of the obvious drivers of at least the car-sharing economy in Paris is the city’s crowded streets and lack of parking spaces. It’s not just that traffic blocks the motorways at most times (which it does), but parking in the city’s winding streets is utterly impacted. I used an Uber to get to a meeting this week and it took double the time it would have taken me in San Francisco to drive across the city due to both traffic and small streets filled with parked, and double parked, cars.

The CEO and founder of Drivy, Paulin Dementhon

It’s also expensive to own and operate a car in Paris. Gas, car ownership and driving on toll roads all take a lot of money. That’s one of the first reasons that people sign up for peer-to-peer car-sharing companies in Paris like Drivy, or BuzzCar, as well as ride sharing services like Blablacar. Car owners can help cover the cost of owning the car, and in the car-sharing schemes, drivers can rent out the cars for cheaper than it would cost to own. For ride sharing, the collaborative consumption economy can reduce the cost of driving.

Parking is also bad enough in the city that if there’s enough cars in the car-sharing company’s network, there’s good odds that one of the shared cars is pretty close to where the user is. Drivy markets its service as closer to where its drivers are (now that it’s got 10,000 cars signed up). There’s an inherent network effect once a company gets big enough. Autolib also has the added bonus of designated parking spots and one-way driving trips.

But beyond the crowded streets and the car-sharing opportunity, Dementhon thinks there’s something more inherent in the Parisian culture that is spurring the web sharing economy in the city. Paris has a well-off population, but is also a place that is relaxed enough to accept some of the messines that it takes to make web sharing work.

“We’re less square. We tolerate less organization,” says Dementhon. Anyone who’s rented a car from a car-sharing network (particularly right after someone has used it), or an apartment off of Airbnb knows what he’s talking about. It takes some getting used to and there’s a lot of things that can be unexpected, like less-than-clean cars and apartments, or quirky cars and apartment owners.

Lessons for the U.S.

Paris has such a vibrant web sharing culture that their American counterparts could stand to learn a thing or two from the Parisians. Blablacar found success with its ridesharing service, when that type of service has failed to take off in the U.S. Drivy also seemed to get its target market right faster than its American counterparts by focusing on day-long and multi-day trips, instead of looking to have its cars rented out by the hour.

Drivy is now particularly focused on making sure its services — for cars and drivers that have problems — is robust and takes care of its users. Blablacar has also spent years developing services — from ratings to engagement to activities — that build trust in its community.

The car technology aspect has been secondary to the Parisian companies, while developing and taking care of their community has been the more important. Drivy hasn’t focused much on the automated tech aspect of its service yet. That’s in contrast to American counterparts Getaround and RelayRides, which have highlighted the automated unlocking and locking systems as major parts of their companies. Dementhon tells me that Drivy will definitely add the automated tech aspect soon enough, but is still looking at how things like IOS for cars change the game.

Both Blablacar and Drivy want to expand on their successes in Paris and grow their services across Europe, but are hesitant to rush into launching in the U.S. The reality is that Paris, and Europe in general, isn’t such a big market for an enterprising startup. Latin America might be more interesting to Drivy when it wants to grow. When they do expand outside of Europe, they’ll take what they learned with them.

We think web sharing startups and tech companies in Paris are interesting enough that we’re growing our coverage of that scene, as well as tech companies across London and Berlin. We’re holding our second annual Structure:Europe conference in London in late September this year, and we’re looking for startups to join our lineup.

]]>Companies are already building big businesses selling digital assets such as computing (Amazon) and music (Spotify) as a service but the purveyers of physical goods are getting in on this business model too. Maybe it’s a car service such as ZipCar or Lyft or even sharing access to homes via Airbnb or HomeAway; when it comes to physical goods, we’re taking the same on-demand models from the digital world to the real world. Even Google may be getting in on this trend with Google Mine.

And as this model matures, data will be both the enabler and a high-value byproduct of the “as-a-service” economy.

Given that the real world has much higher levels of friction — from trying to easily get shared goods to the people who want them, to the regulatory hurdles that might protect consumers but can be used to stifle startups — data about where products are being consumed will be invaluable. Knowing that people in California like to borrow Honda Civics as opposed to pickup trucks can ensure that a car-sharing service stocks the right vehicles in the right market to meet demand.

And while there’s proof that some consumers are changing their behaviors to consume services rather than products, for companies producing physical goods, the sharing economy is both enticing and a threat. Data might help mitigate the pressure such a shift could have on their bottom lines, by helping them price their offerings tuned to each customer or merely offer better customer service.

That’s why a blog post by Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group on the sharing economy got my attention. The post offers a few helpful clues for big companies on how they can test the waters and build business models around collaborative consumption.

It’s a great read, but it doesn’t get into some of the impacts of this shift on consumers and how that in turn might help generate new startup or big business opportunities. For example, Owyang mentions popular business models like Netflix or Comcast delivering video on demand as well as monthly subscriptions to services such as Dollar Shave Club or Bag Borrow or Steal as business models. But as a consumer who subscribes to upwards of 30 services I think there’s an unmentioned opportunity in two areas: payments and the aforementioned data.

In the collaborative consumption model, companies big and small need to rethink how they deliver goods and turn them into services, which is what Owyang focused on. My hunch is physical goods companies will offer a wider array of service-oriented products and have an opportunity to play around with their margins by using granular data to decide how to create packages and what to charge for them. Additionally, if you set in place the tracking mechanisms and automation needed to make a shared good profitable, you can get a lot more data on how a consumer uses it, which could lead to insights about new products or just help deliver the service more efficiently (that’s important when talking about physical assets).

This helps the company providing the service, but is also a potential goldmine of data that the service company can sell to other businesses. For example, sharing data about my travels in a ZipCar might help fast food companies choose future locations or municipalities decide where to allocate transportation dollars. That’s a new line of revenue for those companies.

As for payments, this is a bit more concrete. I need my credit card company or bank to create a lockbox or proxy of sorts where I can change payment information across my 30 different services in one place. I recently had my credit card stolen and am still trying to change the old number in my myriad services that range from Twilio to Nicely Noted, a company that sends me stationery each month.

I want to go to one or two places to adjust my payment information and then have that reflect across all of my services. Because, at an average of eight minutes to go to a site and tweak that setting spread out across 30 different services, that’s four hours of work, especially given that my card is now switched over roughly once a year on average.

So to bring on the consumption economy, big companies should look to data, plus new services that the over-subscribed consumer might appreciate.